Uninstall all installed gems, in OSX?

Question

There are instances where I would like to revert and uninstall all previous gem installations.

For instance, I needed to assist a friend migrate their rails development machine to use RVM. As they had been previously using the system-wide gem, he was experiencing many headaches when working with multiple projects. Essentially, he was the poster-child for an RVM convert.

How can I elegantly uninstall all of the gems on his OSX system?

Beatitude

Nowadays this is unnecessary. RVM knows where to look for the gems after you switch to the right Ruby version. – Eberle

yes Y | gem uninstall -a -I – Hest

Just a quick note to @FranklinYu - this is not always the case. I've had instances where a globally installed copy of Nokogiri seemed to always be taking precedent over the RVM gemset, and the global one had to be uninstalled. – Polar

@NathanCrause Then it’s a bug in RVM and should be reported. I’m pretty sure this isn’t the intended behavior of RVM. – Eberle

@FranklinYu you're right, but until such an issue is resolved, there would still be the need for a way to purge all gems. I was only referring to the point of it being "unnecessary", which would be true in an ideal situation, but hey, things go sideways all the time. – Polar

Answer 1

You could also build out a new Gemfile and run bundle clean --force. This will remove all other gems that aren't included in the new Gemfile.

Mettlesome

best answer because test-unit cannot be uninstalled and kills the process. – Glossematics

Yes, this is the best answer. I feel OP should choose this post 2.0.0. – Futility

This is certainly working for me and much more elegant than other versions – Gilchrist

This is a great technique. Just what I needed. – Irrigation

Answer 2

Rubygems >= 2.1.0

gem uninstall -aIx

a removes all versions
I ignores dependencies
x includes executables

Rubgems < 2.1.0

for i in `gem list --no-versions`; do gem uninstall -aIx $i; done

Beatitude

Duh, you beat me to the speed :) – Miscreant

Then of course, you'll want to re-install a sane list of default gems which for me is: "gem install bundler json minitest rake rdoc" – Sell

gem list | cut -d" " -f1 | sudo xargs gem uninstall -Iax -worked for me – Accent

Does not work: ERROR: While executing gem ... (Gem::InstallError) gem "test-unit" cannot be uninstalled because it is a default gem (gem 2.0.3) – Frankish

@Anthony Though this is a bit dangerous, you can suppress errors with for i in `gem list --no-versions`; do gem uninstall -aIx $i 2>/dev/null; done – Tautomer

Just added sudo for i in sudo gem list --no-versions; do sudo gem uninstall -aIx $i; done – Nnw

Please mention sudo since OP mentioned system-wide gem in OS X. – Eberle

Hey, I'm writing a guide on this topic. Has anyone on gem < 2.1.0 tried this bash script to work around the errors? – Sycosis

Answer 3

A slighest different version, skipping the cut step, taking advantage of the '--no-version' option:

gem list --no-version |xargs gem uninstall -ax

Since you are removing everything, I don't see the need for the 'I' option. Whenever the gem is removed, it's fine.

Drench

sudo shouldn't be necessary if the gems were installed by an ordinary user. – Dissected

See my answer for a reason why I downvoted. I wanted to comment here but comments do not allow lines... – Palmirapalmistry

good, can remove a lot of gems, but something dosen`t it like bundle, rake, rvm – Gehlbach

Very elegant but fails due to the inability to remove default gems. Suggest crftr's solution instead – Discriminant

Answer 4

First make sure you have at least gem version 2.1.0

gem update --system
gem --version
# 2.6.4

To uninstall simply run:

gem uninstall --all

You may need to use the sudo command:

sudo gem uninstall --all

Coextensive

Answer 5

Use either

$ gem list --no-version | xargs gem uninstall -ax

or

$ sudo gem list --no-version | xargs sudo gem uninstall -ax

Depending on what you want, you may need to execute both, because "gem list" and "sudo gem list" provide independent lists.

Do not mix a normal "gem list" with a sudo-ed "gem uninstall" nor the other way around otherwise you may end up uninstalling sudo-installed gems (former) or getting a lot of errors (latter).

Palmirapalmistry

You are right, I edited my answer to exclude sudo. For both versions users can rely on your answer. – Drench

Answer 6

If you are using Rubygems version 2.1.0 or later, you can try: gem uninstall --all.

Bearable

It should be 'gem' not 'gems'. – Coextensive

Answer 7

Rubygems >= 2.1.0

gem uninstall -aIx

If Terminal returns below error

ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::FilePermissionError)
You don't have write permissions for the /Library/Ruby/Gems/2.0.0 directory.

Then write above command as below

sudo gem uninstall -aIx

And enter your mac os account password Done!!

Aliphatic

again same error after executing above command. – Residuum

Answer 8

And for those of you who are here because you want to remove all gems with a certain prefix (ahem I'm looking at you aws-sdk!) you can run something like this:

gem list --no-version | grep "aws-sdk-" | xargs gem uninstall -aIx

Obviously put in your query instead of aws-sdk-. You need the -I in there to ignore dependencies.

Adopted form Ando's earlier answer

Lunatic

Answer 9

If you like doing it using ruby:

ruby -e "`gem list`.split(/$/).each { |line| puts `gem uninstall -Iax #{line.split(' ')[0]}` unless line.strip.empty? }"

Cheers

Scribbler

I am getting an error with this: ERROR: While executing gem ... (Gem::CommandLineError) Please specify at least one gem name (e.g. gem build GEMNAME) – Urinary

@Urinary Fixed, hehe providing support to my answers on Stack Overflow :) – Scribbler

This is handy in that it works in Windows where the command shell is... not good. – Macleod

Answer 10

The only command helped me to cleanup all gems and ignores default gems, which can't be uninstalled

for x in `gem list --no-versions`; do gem uninstall $x -a -x -I; done

Scurf

Answer 11

I did that not too long ago (same poster-child RVM switcher situation):

gem list | cut -d" " -f1 | sudo xargs gem uninstall -Iax

Takes the list of all gems (incl. version stuff), cuts it to keep only the gem name, then uninstalls all versions of such gems.

The sudo is only useful if you had gems installed system-wide, and should not be included unless necessary.

Miscreant

Answer 12

When trying to remove gems installed as root, xargs seems to halt when it encounters an error trying to uninstall a default gem:

sudo gem list | cut -d" " -f1 | xargs gem uninstall -aIx
# ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::InstallError)
#    gem "test-unit" cannot be uninstalled because it is a default gem

This won't work for everyone, but here's what I used instead:

sudo for gem (`gem list | cut -d" " -f1`); do gem uninstall $gem -aIx; done

Dinitrobenzene

Answer 13

gem list --no-version | grep -v -e 'psych' -e 'rdoc' -e 'openssl' -e 'json' -e 'io-console' -e 'bigdecimal' | xargs sudo gem uninstall -ax

grep here is excluding default gems. All other gems will be uninstalled. You can also precede it with sudo in case you get permission issues.

Braddock